I was looking at my 2013 goals (Business Blog, What's the Point Again?) and I felt like it was a good time to check in and see how things are going with my overall goals and strategies for uber.la and my blogging process in general.

It's hard to track the value of this work, because my "leads" are often not direct referrals off the blog, but referrals who use the blog to validate my authority and work in social media. It's my virtual resume. If you want to know about me, google me, and you'll see that uber.la takes up most of the first three results pages, in addition to twitter, facebook, linkedin, and slideshare. But that's what I do. I'm a content creator as well as a consultant and strategist. IF I'm not creating content, if I'm not blogging, if I'm not measuring my own efforts, how can I understand the issues you're business faces?

By working social media, I'm in the trenches too. By serving my clients, I am also developing a library of resources and ideas for you to try. Knowing my audience is probably something I should explore in a post very soon. I'm clear on who I want my audience to be, but am I hitting that mark? This post however, is about what I am doing, and what I've learned.

Here's the slide.

click to view full-size on Slideshare.net

In the last five months I've had 2 big hits. The first one was called Death of the Social Media Strategist. And it was picked up by Business Insider and run as part of a story, that lifted my title completely. (Not a good business practice for an aggregator, but I let the slide with a hand slap due to the beneficial nature of the post.) And while the BI.com referrals gave me some traffic, the majority of the referrals came from several influential tweeters who immediately boosted the story's numbers.

My second hit came as a result of a Facebook post made by a friend. She had captured a screenshot of the final tweets of the suspected Boston Bomber. My imagination ran wild and I came up with a funnier look at what must've been doing through his head in the final hours in "the boat" in "Watertown" without water.

Two other posts showing in my top 10, are the Information Overload post that generated a bit of buzz but didn't break into viral territory. And my career road map. Since these two posts showed early signs of trending I created clickable buttons on the right-hand side of the page. Clickable ads for my own content. This is an attempt to give a first time visitor something else of interest to click on. We'll see how those develop as time goes on, but I like that they are already in the top 10 report.

And the same contenders showed up in the referer column, in about the same order as normal.

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

Google+

Business Insider (new)

Reddit

StumbleUpon

And the bottom line, on conversion metrics shows that of the 16k people that visited this blog so far this year, 200 of them viewed my contact page. And while I cannot attribute a single piece of business to a direct website referral, I can say that as a sample of my work product, this blog is doing it's part. I did get several referrals from previous colleagues.

And here's the biggest lesson I got from this exercise. A friend said to me today, "We're need to talk about your Facebook addiction."

In a moment of clarity I said, "It's funny you should say that, but my last three referrals, all came through people I was connected to on Facebook. I make my living off Facebook."

And the theme running through each of the referrals… When they were looking for how to build up their social media program, or a social media program for one of their clients, I was the name that came to mind. And if ONE of these projects gets green-lighted, I'm going to have a lot more to blog about (with sanitized and anonymized data, of course) soon.

As a referral engine, staying on someone's radar on Facebook is hard work. The secret to my Facebook work is consistency. I'm checking accounts and business pages for several clients on a regular basis. When checking in on Facebook I look for things of value to repost to the people who follow (or friend) me because of my social media info. And cats. Always with the cats on Facebook.

Bottom Line: Uber.la is my proving ground.

New Goal: Establish new business/site/brand to highlight the consulting work I do. Uber.la can be the BLOG of that services business. Uber.la is not a consulting brand.

Let's see how I can do, launching a new business site in the next 10 days. Stay tuned.